Michael Moon: The rise and fall and the rise again. Yes. About 12 years ago I read a book called "Jesus Christ Was an Ad Man," by a fellow named Jerry Fitzgibbons. And in it he makes, he draws numerous parallels between how Jesus created a brand and a transcendental franchise and developed a positioning for his franchise, to how companies do the same in a commercial market.

And at that point there was a switch that went on in my life. It said that everything that I am now learning about marketing, I have already studied inside and out, in my exhaustive study of mysticism and religion. And, in fact, it is really this idea that informs a lot of the insights that I initially had about marketing.

One little more footnote I want to add to this. One of my partners, a guy named James Byrum, took our research methodology, which was to go to the most, the best productive, the most satisfied group of folks and then reverse engineer the process by which they got there. He took this same solutions research or methodology and applied it to successful long term married, partnered relationships. And developed a huge body of knowledge on what it takes to create long term satisfying, intimate, growing, inter-dependent, spiritual partnerships.

So really two things from my history, two things inform most of what I say and think. One, the study of mysticism and religion. And two, the systematic research of the critical success factors for successful relationships.

Interviewer: So, when you were introduced to this group of people who call themselves digital storytellers, in particular the work...

Michael Moon: I felt that I had come home.

Interviewer: And what do you think about digital storytelling? How would you define it?

Michael Moon: Well, storytelling as such, digital or otherwise, remains so fundamental, so pervasive that it almost serves as a context for life, as opposed to any one thing in life. So you can dedicate your entire life to it and maybe only master the smallest fraction of it.

Interviewer: Boy, do I feel that.

Michael Moon: At the end of the day, storytelling really comes down to connecting people through experiences and information and nuance. It is really about connecting people to possibilities that they may not necessarily have known they had before.

And I would like to draw a distinction that really great storytelling... First of all, I don't believe you can tell anything. I don't believe you can share or tell anything to someone else that they don't already have, intrinsically. So communication is not a transmission process, it is an invocation process. It is about invoking what they had already, but didn't have the lens or the context by which to discern it.

I really want to emphasize that as a key discernment in storytelling in general, and great storytelling, in particular.

Interviewer: It is a dialogic art. You are in a conversation in the sharing of story, you are not in the singular communications between a passive listener and a pre-scripted performer. We have been thinking about the classical role of the storyteller or bard and its relationship to its audience and where the lines between conversational storytelling and performative storytelling have developed over time. In an oral culture, everybody has to learn pre-scripted stories, because they are a central survival mechanism. They have to be memorized, as part of the fundamental process of planting and staying healthy, etc.

Moving into a world of networked multimedia invokes the conversational, the informal, in story. There is a return to a very different kind of oral relationship in which media is used as to extend the conversation in a storytelling environment. It is not exactly contradictory to the literary and broadcast cultures that we have known for the past 500 years. But I think it is informed in a funny way, more by orality than it was by literacy or by broadcast culture in the 20th century. Just as you have studied the mystics, I have also looked at the question of who became storytellers as a hierarchy in culture developed codified religion where often people who would have been chosen by their natural inclination to be shaman, or mystic leaders or medicine persons etc. In a way, the culture of the last 2,000 years has made our shamans into entertainers. These effective entertainer/storytellers, like the shamen of a primitive culture, are often people who have had life experiences in which they return from the abyss of psychological or physical challenge, with very effective stories, either as young persons or later in life.

The transformation that happened when they returned from the abyss, made them able to source human emotions in ways that a person simply reciting the text or even reciting the story could not hope to do. And that seems essential in both effective communication here at the end of the 20th century in a business context, as being able to source your own emotional content.

Michael Moon: Well, this has obviously opened up at least a half bottle of Jack Daniels, in our four hour conversation.

Interviewer: The argument for this report for the Institute for the Future is that if you have critical self-awareness, which you develop through developing coherent stories from your life, that your personal brand will be clearer to you, more powerful and more effective in whatever marketplace that you put your personal brand. And, conversely, that a corporation or organization that is trying to create brand identity can be much more effective as it integrates the values of its staff, clients, suppliers, etc into its organization . This can only be done with story.

Michael Moon: First of all, the network economy and the wired world have fundamentally shifted how power gets created and distributed. And one of the things that the network economy has done, it has shifted power radically to the individual and to the customer. Individuals and/or customers now have historically unparalleled power in their dealings with their suppliers, vendors and the structures of state.

One of the things that has emerged in the network economy is that it used to be that if you had a product, you could drive it to a commanding position in the market, irrespective of whether the customer liked you as a person and/or supported your politics, and your world view. This has changed.

This is one of the things that is fundamentally misunderstood about Amazon.com. Why Amazon.com has market capitalization five or six times larger than Barnes & Noble, even though Barnes & Noble has ten times greater sales. Amazon.com stands as a company who really, really got the interactive relationship as its brand, as why people do business with them.

Okay. So I guess what I am trying to set up here is the networked economy is about interactive, trusted relationships based on a perceived, fair exchange of value among both parties. So as a consensual relationship, both parties win or they fucking don't play. This is radical. A radical departure from the old idea that you can have it any color you want so long as it's black.

So the power has shifted. And most of the companies remain deeply clueless as far as how far out on the short end of the powerstick they are. So we have major companies set up for major reversal of fortunes. I am doing that as a backdrop.

Interviewer: It is an effective backdrop.

Michael Moon: What does that mean for the person? Well there are three things that happens as a person. As an economic actor and I really want to draw the distinction between you, Interviewer, or me, Michael Moon and the economic actor of Interviewer, Inc. Okay. So I don't want to get into the messy philosophical conversation of commoditising the spirit called Joe. Or the nominalization, i.e. turning you into a thing that then has an object that has a value in a marketplace.

But it is clear that certain expressions of Interviewer have value in a marketplace. So when I talk about a brand, that is what I am talking about. I am talking about economic expressions of you as opposed to you as a spirit.

Interviewer: I understand.

Michael Moon: Okay. You may understand that, but whenever we bring that rabbit out of the hat or that genii out of the bottle, everyone starts going, you are turning people into these economic objects and, it is offensive and repugnant and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Interviewer: There are philosophic lines that we, as educated consumers in this new marketplace, have to learn about. Otherwise we can imagine that we are going to have a heartfelt relationship with some corporate brand who will break our hearts in ways that we can't imagine.

Michael Moon: Right.

Interviewer: So we never want to go that far.

Michael Moon: I understand. But I wanted to draw the distinction...

Interviewer: Yes.

Michael Moon: ...that we are talking about, if you will, the objectification or the nominalization of certain expressions of Interviewer.

Interviewer: Right.

Michael Moon: Or Michael Moon. And, so that is one. The second thing is that a brand really stands as kind of a proxy. It is a place holder for who I am in the real, in the real flesh. So as I, as Interviewer builds up his brand, if you will, what we are talking about is that you are creating a set of associations that uniquely identify the value that Joe brings to some sort of a situation. Economic or otherwise.

So in that respect it serves very much like brands in a market. It telegraphs value, it re-enforces certain values, certain qualities. It makes an implicit promise as to future performance. It also says, I am not X or Y. I am this. So there is a polarity or a potential conflict. A point of differentiation and, if made aggressively, a competitive distinction.

And then, lastly, this is why I also started with the I Corp., increasingly we find that a lot of our values, a lot of the values that we create in the marketplace, comes in a mediated, in a digital mediated, computer-generated, computer transmitted, a computer received medium.

So increasingly we have to learn how to extend our brand, our offer, our promise, our stand as for certain values and virtues. We have to learn how to then extend our brand into this new medium. And that is what we might call a digital brand.

So a digital brand says, well there are all these good things that we already know about brands and either as a product or me as an economic actor. How does this change in a digital medium and more importantly in a digital storytelling medium? And this has profound implications that I think collectively we have only begun to even glimpse much less understand.

Every brand tells a story. But not every story constitutes a brand. Every brand has a set-up, a build and a payoff. Every brand posits a certain possibility and it entails an agon. It entails an engagement of a tragedy, a conflict, a tearing apart and then putting back together in a newer, higher ordered synthesis. You know, classic Aristotelian poetics, right?

So then we are back to full circle now. Ultimately, how we begin to express, how we begin to build and reinforce our brand really reflects effective story telling.